The Spanish National Police have dismantled an illegal manga distribution network that generated €4 million in profits. Discover how they used cryptocurrency wallets to conceal their assets.
The Spanish Government, through the Ministry of the Interior, has reported that an operation carried out by the National Police in Almería has led to the dismantling of the main platform for the illicit distribution of manga in Spanish.
The operation is notable not only for the volume of traffic on the website, which has been active since 2014 with millions of monthly visits, but also for the sophisticated method of concealing assets used by its administrators. During the house search, agents seized physical storage devices containing more than €400.000 in cryptocurrencies, representing approximately 10% of the total funds seized.
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The network dismantled by the police investigation Its success was not based on the direct sale of content, but on an aggressive advertising architecture designed to capitalize on massive traffic.
According to the report presented by the Ministry of the Interior, the portal generated profits exceeding 4 million euros through pop-up window systems or pop-upsThis strategy allowed administrators to earn a steady income every time a user interacted with the manga reader.
However, the aspect that most interests cybersecurity analysts is the management of these funds. The finding of Two USB devices hidden in a wall thermometer, which functioned as cold wallets or cold walletsIt confirms that those responsible were looking for ways to remove their profits from the control of the traditional financial system, using the pseudonymous nature of blockchain technology to safeguard a portion of the capital accumulated over more than a decade.
However, the idea that the crypto ecosystem guarantees absolute anonymity continues to lose ground to technical reality. Blockchain transactions can be precisely tracked, allowing specialized teams to reconstruct the flow of funds, especially when they attempt to move to asset exchange platforms. In this case, physical access to the private keys stored on the devices allowed Spanish authorities to seize the assets before they were redistributed.
The operation directly impacts the organization's financial base, which was already developing a new platform to expand its reach. With three arrests in Andalusia and the seizure of funds, that project has been halted, marking a significant turning point in the investigation.
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Beyond the technical sophistication of the police operation, the repercussions are being felt strongly in the publishing industry. The closure of this piracy network has brought relief to publishers, translators, and manga distributors who work under formal licenses and who, for years, have endured massive competition that directly impacted their revenue and diminished the value of their creative efforts.
Furthermore, as the National Police pointed out, the problem of piracy went beyond economics. The dismantled platform also exposed a mostly young audience to inappropriate advertising, a factor that heightened the authorities' concerns and positioned the case as a matter of public interest. The intervention is seen as a step towards a balance for a sector seeking to protect its work and ensure fairer conditions in the digital world.
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